The power of accent lighting

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

We all know that light is incredibly important in a photograph. After all, photography is painting with light, but how does this actually work when you look at a photograph without any photography knowledge?

Most people will respond best to a photograph that is evenly lit, for the simple reason that you can see everything clearly. So you could say 'just shoot everything with a large softbox, send the invoice, and you're done'.

But of course, as a photographer, you also want a bit of a challenge. So how are we going to approach this?

If we look purely at art, anything is possible, of course. In fact, when I look at the photographs that sell for thousands of euros, I regularly think 'WTF'.

And I don't think I'm the only one, so let's see how we can make a standard portrait a bit more interesting.

Flat light

High-contrast light

This is of course much more fun for us as photographers. You also get much more of a 3D effect in your photographs now, but the problem is that the subject can no longer look directly into the camera.

The light would no longer fall into their eyes, and that is something we do like to see, so these kinds of photographs are not really suitable for a face book. There, we do like that direct communication with the viewer.

With a bit of adjusting, you can create photographs that give a sense of depth, but it really takes some searching to find the balance.

But that does not mean that this cannot produce a beautiful portrait. In fact, in my opinion it creates a much stronger image.

But let's be honest, often all we want is a dark side and a light side. So...

Separation

But let's be honest, these are often somewhat less striking photographs. So we usually also use an extra light at the side, which we call accent or rim lighting. And that can be quite tricky when you are just starting out with photography.

The first thing you need to keep a close eye on is that this is a very important light source. If you position the accent light incorrectly, you end up with photographs that... well, are not what you want.

With ugly shadows, or overexposed areas on the shadow side. Or you cannot see it at all, or it... You get the idea, all sorts of things can go wrong.

I usually use a strip light with a grid or a standard reflector, with or without a grid, as accent lighting. I often use the latter feathered for lens flares, I will cover that in more detail in another article in the future if you like, but for now let's look at the strip light.

The advantage of a strip light is that you have a nice, large light source. So you get soft light, but because it is very narrow you have a lot of control over the light. With a grid, it all becomes even “better”

How do you set this up successfully?

Once you have the “main lighting” sorted, you will soon discover that there is very little room for the model to move when adjusting the accent lighting.

Don't worry, though. It is absolutely not rocket science, but you do need to pay close attention to how the accent lighting falls.

That is why I put “main light” in quotation marks, because although it remains the light that has the greatest influence on the overall image, setting the accent light correctly is especially important, and it is actually the light source that gets the most attention.

Good luck!

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